I live in central Kentucky and I can hear the LYQ navigational beacon down in Tennessee quite strong most early mornings/evenings on 530 KHz on my car radio. It is usually mixed in with a station playing Latin instrumental music. I was just wondering if anyone else is hearing the beacon, and what the Latin station I am hearing on 530 KHz might be? Could it be Cuban or Domincan Republic?

There are so many Latino stations around in the US now, that hearing Spanish or Latin music no longer guarantees that you're listening to Centroamerica or the Caribbean. If it's right on 530 it's likely from the US, but serving a Hispanic population. Florida maybe? I believe that Central America and the Caribbean uses 9khz spacing, while Mexico still uses 10khz. Furthermore, I believe that the Central American/Caribbean band starts around 540, as does Europe. It could conceivably be Mexico or Cuba, but it's more likely that it's USA.

The more interesting inhabitant of the crowded 530 kHz neighborhood is beacon LYQ owned by a rather infamous ham. Online he asked hams for ideas on improving its signal. Seems he got it working. LYQ, in central Tennessee, has been reported over a wide area. I hear it weakly in St Louis on 529 kHz. I had never noticed it before buried under local highway traffic advisory stations on 530.

LYQ is apparently owned by the same ham/pilot who owns the despised beacon on 30 meters: (is that still on the air?)

Thanks guys. I am not a pilot, but I am wondering what a navigational beacon is doing on what is supposed to be the the AM broadcast band, at least here in the U.S.? The beacon comes in really strong here in Kentucky. I just happened to be tuning around the AM band on my way back home from my dad's house in Louisville on Thanksgiving, and I heard the beacon. My twin brother who is also a ham was riding with me, and I told him I would do a Google search for the "LYQ beacon" and let him know where it was. Thanks for the information guys. Merry Christmas!

This was posted in 2007 email to that address bounces.----------------------WA4SZE@gmail.comSeptember 26th 07, 06:13 AMWe have just installed a new NDB beacon here at our private airport43TN . The new beacon is on 529 KHZ the ID is LYQ

We would like to know if you can hear it at your location??? Atnight, if you tune your car radio to 530 AM you should hear the MorseCode LYQ over and over again.

"We would like to know if you can hear it at your location??? At night, if you tune your car radio to 530 AM you should hear the Morse Code LYQ over and over again."

This guy seems to delight in interfering with legit operations whether on 30 meters or a smidgen off the AM radio dial, virtually on top of traffic advisory stations. 529 KHz is an authorized NDB frequency but it is rarely used for that purpose.

WWRB is a shortwave station that has an interesting history. When it was WWFV, or World Wide Freedom's Voice, this guy would come on the rec.radio.shortwave usenet group and beg for money to keep his station running, and complain that shortwave users weren't supporting his station and it's "real" programming. People on the group noted that WWFV got sort of the leftovers of SW programming, and the guy responded with ad hominem attacks.

We have a local charity-owned TV station that intermixes half hour donation pleas with obscure 1950s westerns. I actually found myself listening to The Gabby Hayes Show at 1 AM a few nights ago. That was perhaps the 72nd highest rated TV show of 1954.

Yeah, I realize there's some connection between the airport, the NDB and a shortwave broadcast station. Was reluctant to give the broadcaster the plug.

We have a local charity-owned TV station that intermixes half hour donation pleas with obscure 1950s westerns. I actually found myself listening to The Gabby Hayes Show at 1 AM a few nights ago. That was perhaps the 72nd highest rated TV show of 1954.

Yeah, I realize there's some connection between the airport, the NDB and a shortwave broadcast station. Was reluctant to give the broadcaster the plug.

WBCQ, a station in Maine run by a former pirate BCer, used to play craploads of Bill Cooper's Hour of the Time. Bill Cooper was certifiably nuts, and finally decided that he knew too much about the Illuminati/Freemason Conspiracy to continue living, which involved him committing "suicide by cop". He probably knew that this would make him a martyr among his equally deluded listeners, who immediately claimed that he'd been assassinated for "knowing too much".

Frankly, out of all the conspiracy kooks on SW, I'm surprised that he's the only one who has done this. I guess the other guys are too busy spending the money they make from selling fake gold and cubic zirconia passed off as diamonds to their listeners with the promise that it will "keep its value" once SHTF. Well, since it's hard to go below zero... Also, tons of unmilled wheat. You'll notice that the guys on Doomsday Preppers all weigh 500 lbs, this is due to all the wheat they eat. Anyway, the other conspiracy mongers are too narcissistic to actually die for "truth" and "freedom". You'll note that the govt never takes any action against them, this is due to them being wrong.

My Kenwood transceiver goes up to 7400 khz, and when I switched bands one day I found myself listening to a BC stn on 7385, not sure who. Anyway, there was some dude with a southern accent on there, and he was saying that America was doomed because we had abandoned God. He proved this by saying that nobody in the fed.gov is willing to stand up to Obama and...ask him his real name. "We don't know what his real name is, we think it's Barry Soetoro, but we don't know. But not one federal official will ask him." Seriously, you can't make this up.

We used to have a low power TV station here in Sacramento that would play obscure 1950s stuff. One Man's Family, stuff like that. My grandparents discovered it one day and were over the moon. They hadn't seen the old shows in ages. They had me try to track down a programming schedule for the place. I called an offered phone number and surprisingly got a live person. He sent my grandfather a program sked. I'm surprised that charity TV station where you are made the move to digital, most of the fleawatters couldn't, and shut down.

I had to refresh my memory on Cooper. There's a YT video of his first radio show from 1992. I endured his droning for a few minutes and moved on. As an engrossing speaker he's no Gabby Hayes ("yer der tootin' dadgumit").

I always wondered how big the U.S. audience is for shortwave programming. Come to think of it, I can't recall ever meeting anyone who listened to it except some hams years ago. Whatever the audience once was, it can't be a tenth that now.

But I guess SW might make good company while out watching the skies for ET, and imagining things.

I had to refresh my memory on Cooper. There's a YT video of his first radio show from 1992. I endured his droning for a few minutes and moved on. As an engrossing speaker he's no Gabby Hayes ("yer der tootin' dadgumit").

I always wondered how big the U.S. audience is for shortwave programming. Come to think of it, I can't recall ever meeting anyone who listened to it except some hams years ago. Whatever the audience once was, it can't be a tenth that now.

But I guess SW might make good company while out watching the skies for ET, and imagining things.

Shortwave programming was always the province of kooks and weirdos. You wanna know how cheap SW airtime is? There used to be a station in Miami, WRMI, that would sell you airtime for $1 a minute. You, me, anybody, to say anything legal, for a buck a minute. I couldn't believe it, so I emailed them, around 2001 I think. They confirmed the $1 a minute rate, the times they quoted me were off peak, Sunday afternoons and stuff like that.

The main station out there now is WWCR, and while it means Christian Radio they mostly have conspiracy nuts. I think WRMI is gone, I'm not sure about WBCQ, WWRB manages to cobble together a living, and the rest of the stn's are run by obscure churches. WEWN represents the Catholic viewpoint, it's run by nuns, and the Vatican tolerates it because the Holy See doesn't have the resources to run a 24/7 SW stn. Lately the trend in Catholic outreach has been for individual dioceses to run MW stations in their hometowns. The rest of the churches on SW are Evangelical.

Private SW was much more interesting in the 80s. Reagan legalized it in 82 I think, and for a while you could hear pop music on WRNO, and various other great stuff. One station that was small and kooky, but with a lot of heart, was Radio For Peace International, which was tied to the United Nations and which represented the "New Left", the Sixties milieu that produced Hillary and Obama. Their transmitter and studio were destroyed in a dispute with the small social justice college in Costa Rica where they were located. When they went off, a lot of limo libs who live on yachts in the Caribbean whined that their background noise was gone. Seriously, these guys would listen on their boats, and just have it on all the time.

SW listening simply isn't what it used to be. You can't get censored news on RHC anymore, all they ever talk about is the Cuban Five. The few stations that broadcast to the USA do so to promote their internal affairs. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, all our enemies beam programming to the US. Cuba can go in that slot too. I was a fan of REE Spain's news, but they're gone now, although they still broadcast in Spanish. No more Beeb, not that anybody misses them and their corrupt views. Churchill is crying somewhere over the fate of his beloved BBC. No more Radio Nederland, no more DW. Sigh. The only maker of SW radios out there is the Chinese govt, and they consider domestic SW a vital tool of control.

Funny thing: Driving home alone tonight I had the car radio on 530 trying to determine the range of our local traffic advisory station. Those stations do darn well for their extreme low power and tiny antennas. I start hearing weak Morse in the background. It was LYQ from 400 miles away coming in under the St. Louis Advisory Station!

A buck a minute! The audience has to be microscopic at that rate card. But paying that pittance enables egotistical nutwads to brag about their "international radio audience." And plenty of them do that. They also pay to have their books printed via the vanity press. I knew a very wealthy guy, a self-styled political pundit, who did both of those things. He had almost zero followers but he had a radio show and he published books.

I remember WRNO. My, they were loud here. Last year I fixed up a 1938 Zenith table radio that had shortwave and I spent a good part of the evening listening to the Radio Havana's famous ham program that happened to be on.

There. That's my total exposure to short wave broadcasting in the last 25 years.

I think the preacher that was mentioned was probably Brother Stair. He has been on the shortwave bands for many years, as well as some of the MW stations. Bill Cooper used to keep things interesting, that's for sure. His broadcast on 9-11-01 was certainly interesting. I used to listen to him on WBCQ at night before I would go to bed. I work for Amazon.com, and his book, "Behold a Pale Horse" is actually still being printed and sold. Anyone remember KUSW from the late 80's-early 90's? I used to listen to them and WRNO quite a bit when I was a freshman in high school and had just purchased a Realistic shortwave radio from Radio Shack. This was around the time I was really starting to get interested in shortwave listening and getting a ham license, but with no driver's license at 15, and no job, I had to make do with what I had. This usually involved talking to the local idiots on the CB. Good times.

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